I meant to write things all week for my blog, but I never seemed to get around to it. Very annoying to say the least. But, a summary of the week is: twelve pounds of muffins, half a ton of computers, two CD’s, and one rejection letter.
2007-03-30
2007-03-20
2007-03-19
A Week of Writing
Well, my week vacation was over. It was actually a pretty good one. Five loads of laundry, dishes, updated my resume, wrote four short stories. The stories alone were 40k words combined, which is 4/5th of a NaNoWriMo in a single week. That left me in a happy flush. Overall, I’m seriously considering not bothering with computer game projects this year and just doing writing. I seem to be happier doing it and it doesn’t have the learning curve of a game.
I also got an email from a furry publisher who might be interesting in a novel. I have one already on my list of things todo, so I might consider just writing that or actually starting on “Peg and Sue Get Lost in Space” or “My Father’s Bike”. Both of them would take about three months to finish. I’m also toying with just sitting down and finishing Wind, Bear, and Moon with the world revamp. I decided Welf is going to be more mechanically inclined instead of just avoiding sword fighting.
Game Results and Burnout
This weekend was a hilarious and fun-filled weekend. The Exalted Sepia Throne game ended up being a series of limit breaks and bad ideas turning into worse ideas. Almost everyone played perfectly into their character, including the situations where they were choosing to do things that the players knew was a terrible idea. I almost killed a player, but a really bad roll resulted in only 4 successes out of 22 dice and they live. I don’t like killing off players, but I wasn’t really holding back. Uteck does say that I can control dice, since I consistently roll poorly when I really need to. There might be something to it, I’ve gotten only 17 successes on 250 dice before.
We did end up making a house rule about dash and long actions (you keep dashing the entire length, even if it is over 3 ticks, you suffer with the additional DV penalty the entire time).
The rest of the weekend has pretty much been an entire big pile of “blah.” It is pretty normal with good sessions, I put so much into them that I get burned out afterwards. I couldn’t even find the energy to read a book. Well, I finished a good research report on the economics and synthetic worlds, but anything beyond that was just too much. In the end, I just started watching the second season of Babylon 5 and just tried to relax.
2007-03-12
Interesting Weekend
I did a fair amount this weekend, given the fact that I wasn’t feeling on the top of the world. I sent out a query letter for Muddy Reflections. I’m not comfortable with sending out batches yet, so I’ll probably just send out one at a time, or overlap them by a few weeks. This one was to Writers House. I was glad I could say I was on White Wolf’s quarterly too. I also did a synopsis and a chapter outline. I also finished a story for the Machine of Death anthology and submitted it.
2007-03-11
Opinions on Bridge to Terabithia
Last night, Fluffy got cabin fever about noon. About normal, she was in the house for almost twenty hours and that is the point she starts to get twitchy. So, she saw a trailer for Bridge to Terabithia and was reminded that I expressed a small amount of interest in it. So, a couple hours of pleading later, she got me to get dressed (I’m sick right now), and head on over.
The trailer for Bridge is wonderful. It makes you think of a story where two teenagers are transported to a magical land, not unlike Narnia or the Neverending Story. Fantastic creatures, battles with the strange and curious, and even a magical land. The cold cruelty of the trailers is that it shows the sum of Terabithia. If you want to see young children enjoying the lovely fantasy world, stick with the trailer. There really isn’t anything else. The rest of the movie is about a boy growing up and experiencing a very significant point of his life. Based on a novel I never read.
The movie is good, but it wasn’t what I thought I was going to. It is the type of emotional story I grew up with, reading in the school library. However, I probably wouldn’t buy it on DVD and I probably wouldn’t watch it ever again.
2007-03-09
I fail geography
A long time ago, I used to be fairly good at geography. I knew most of the countries and states on sight. However, I just recently found a little SVG game by one of the really cool short game writers and realized that I was wrong 94% of the time. The states I did better, about 1 in 4. I need to get a refresher on those, I suspect. Maybe this is one of those things using loci methods of memorization would be useful? Na. :)
2007-03-08
Google Maps
I got every location in stephenls’ map updated on my online map of Creation. I also got the beginning of changing the icons around so the cities have a different appearance from the celestial gates. If you look at the Sepia Throne map, you can see that the Sepia stuff has a different color. The white icons are the canon (or mostly canon at this point) with the wheat ones being the Sepia Throne stuff.
I’m thinking about “announcing” it to some of the forums to see what people think. Stephenls hasn’t responded to my emails, so I’m going to leave off their map until I get feedback. I’d love to have feedback and see if people just think I’m doing the right thing. Of course, most of it is leading into doing my own fantasy world, but at least something cool is coming out of it.
2007-03-05
Fairly Fun Weekend
I actually had a fairly good time this weekend. The Sepia Throne game ended up going in a completely different direction than I originally planned. On the other hand, we actually advanced three of the character-specific subplots and got some progress on the primary arc plot.